RIP Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the Apollo program. She coined the term “software engineering”. I vividly remember her keynote at ICSE 2018 in Sweden. She signed her lego set for one of my kids. She was an inspiration to many. nytimes.com/2026/10/07/obituar…
kinda wild that margaret hamilton had to coin the term "software engineering" to get her team's work a budget line at nasa. 100 people landed humans on the moon with 64kb and hand-woven core rope memory.
Software Engineering is honestly rotten to the core. The lack of rigour and attention to correctness has made me hate our industry. I spent two decades working extra hard, I create robust systems which fail safely. Only I find myself alone atop the mountain in a world which doesn't give a fuck.
DATA CENTER BROS: whyyyy does everyone hate us??????? ALSO DATA CENTER BROS: we've decided that out of all of an entire continent, the best place for us to build is on top of the last remaining trees of an important & almost extinct species which conservationists have been trying to save for decades
My bluesky is becoming a fact checking account, istg. First: Discord IDs are not secret at all. Second: This is a third party service (think MEE6) who got hacked, not Discord Third: Email addresses were of their users. Discord API does not allow email fetch except via OAuth
Fantastic write up on the evolution (or de-evolution, depending on your view) of Apple’s icons. (Though the pedantic design nerd part of me would argue that Apple icons are not technically squircles, they are round-rects with eased corners. Squircles are super-ellipses with no straight segments.) But ignore me and read this thing from a real designer! - parakeet.co/blog/the-shape-of-…
The "Zero-RAM" Tab Hibernation Myth: Why Sleeping Tabs Still Cost 40-90MB How chasing zero memory usage broke tabs with the about:blank amnesia trap, why Chromium partition sessions retain 40-90MB of RAM, and the pragmatic unmounting architecture that slashed memory bloat safely. rakosn1cek.github.io/Mise-brow… #MiseBrowser #Linux #Electron #indiedev #FOSS #opensource
I made another programming language: github.com/aardappel/go... Safer, faster, and uses less memory than Rust & C++. No allocators, no GC, stable pointers to growing in-line data structures:
Nearly Every JPEG on Earth Runs on Math a Reviewer Called Too Simple to Fund in 1972 by Alex Cooke fstoppers.com/historical/nearl…
RIP Margret Hamilton aka rope mother. Thanks for getting us to the moon. And she did it all without an LLM or even stack overflow. A true legend. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...
Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative Email and calendars move in-house in 2027, with European open source tools to follow #OpenSource #Linux theregister.com/on-prem/2026/1…
great video from Baldur Bjarnason Software developers are not okay www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsEp... i think tech folx who are noping out of the modern tech industry should go back to what folx used to do -- start their OWN things, make their OWN products, make their OWN companies
Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain because they relate to feminism | Meta | The Guardian theguardian.com/technology/202… > Theatre told that Facebook and Instagram filter out ads mentioning ‘social topics’ such as civil rights or feminism #Meta #censorship
This a 3rd party app used by servers, not Discord themselves. What was stolen was "Discord IDs" as in your username; not your government ID. This breach effects thousands of users who never submitted their actual real world ID to Discord. As this is entirely different to that.
RIP to a legend and a reminder that this field was pioneered by women as much, if not more, than men.
And the "censoring" that existed wasn't for cynical nonsense. 1337 speak was invented to bypass censors that were genuinely concerned with hacking and adult material. We had to say hax0rz instead of hackers. pr0n instead of porn. Now people say "unalive" just because of advertisers. So sad.
I do like the MPEG LA completely ruining what they had going (well, they're now like fifteen different patent pools if you want to guess how they ruined what they had), with everyone using MPEG almost exclusively for decades and AVC+AAC in particular seeing almost literally 100% adoption, and now HEVC/VVC have pathetic adoption while everyone loves VP9 and AV1
I was especially a fan of this outage happening while I was trying to merge security advisories for release today. 😒
killing whoever suggested using the "Windows and Linux" (s2idle) sleep mode was preferred over the "Linux S3" (deep) mode for Linux users of the ThinkPad X13 Gen 2 I've been having issues with this laptop just not sleeping when the lid's closed, turns out that applied to manually sleeping too
Klara Systems on the importance of LTS support for operating systems and Klara's own #FreeBSD LTS offering klarasystems.com/articles/free… Great quote: The alternative to LTS is not usually a heroic upgrade; it is either running unpatched, or quietly migrating to a platform that offers the window the business needs. Linux distributions understood that support length is retention. Platforms that ignore it lose exactly their most committed, longest-horizon users.
With so many hacks happen to Discord, can you seriously trust them with age verification. I surely don’t. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1006670/discord-users-data-was-exposed-in-a-breach-at-server-bot-double-counter
W3C issues press release about developing Verifiable Credential Barcodes Recently the data theft of approximately 160 million drivers licenses from the US and Canada was reported and unfortunately, identity thieves will use this data to impersonate victims. Real-time revocation is needed to protect individuals against identity theft. W3C Verifiable Credential Barcodes are the solution to the future of physical document security. Read more at: w3.org/news/2026/w3c-issues-pr… #VerifiableCredentials
Margaret Hamilton led the effort to turn software development into an engineering discipline. In essence, she was the mother of software engineering.
Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” beta introduces major security upgrades, including Linux kernel 7.3, OpenSSL 4.0, TPM-backed encryption, signed & slimmed down GRUB, authd support for Microsoft MFA, and more. alternativeto.net/news/2026/10…
I'm curious how popular gesture navigation actually is on phones, or if it's mostly being used because it's being forced. I don't think i've ever seen someone using it on their phone who doesn't end up fumbling around and the phone doing the wrong thing half the time.
ROOST president @camillefrancois sat down with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger to talk about the partners, teams, contributors, scientists, and really the community of people who have come together over the past 18 months to make online safety tools available for everyone. Over that time, open source safety has taken big steps forward. But there's still an asymmetry between building a new tool and making it safe to use. Camille talked about what it takes to close that gap, where the hardest problems in safety sit, and the fellow travelers taking this bet alongside us to raise the floor for safety everywhere. True to form, there's also some discussion of pirates and Star Trek. Watch the video from the “Possible” podcast here on YouTube, or listen to the latest episode wherever you get your podcasts. youtube.com/watch?v=RQpx17UAK9M #OpenSource #ROOST #TrustAndSafety
pretty much been reducing my reliance on meta while also trying to keep the apps too basically switching to various apps that are similar to meta apps (Pixelfed, Signal, never used Threads, Instants nor Edits)
"But JB," you ask in my mind, "what about other types of devices on removable hardware?" Yes! there are all kinds of weird problems here. My Thunderbolt dock has two identical monitors plugged into its two HDMI ports. This may *seem* like a totally normal thing to do, but it induces all kinds of problems that make it difficult for the system to reliably tell the two monitors apart. I think a lot of the ugliness in my case is happening in the Intel video or Thunderbolt drivers. The two monitors end up as dp0 and dp1 (the Thunderbolt dock is presumably using a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter internally, this is surprisingly common), but they could be either way around depending on chance.
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That's a big problem for dual-monitor users, because it means that the monitors only have a 50% chance of ending up in the right spatial relationship, as far as how the mouse works. Every time you wake up the computer! KDE goes as far as using the serial numbers of the monitors (from EDID information) to recognize them later. Even then, it's buggy for me and I sometimes "gamble on monitors" when waking up my computer, but YMMV. Something is happening somewhere where KDE sometimes gets the same serial number for both monitors, but I'm not quite sure where that mixup is happening... and neither is the kind soul who picked up my bug report about it. There's some whack-a-mole here as many other bugs in this whole situation have already been reported and fixed.
people have to stop comparing atproto to google and http, they are not comparable. atproto fundementally changes a deeply established design pattern for what accounts are and how they work. i want it to succeed, but its not as simple as people want it to be. we are going to need to do a lot more.
Switched from 1 telemetry request == 1 sqs message to buffering/compressing many into 1 sqs message. I knew I'd need to someday but made it 2 years-ish the old way. Messages decrease and message size increases. You get charged for 64k whether you use 1k or 64k so might as well batch.
great panel with @robin.berjon.com @scarnecchia.net and @cathleen.eurosky.social who reminds us that "if we want to have a chance to create an open social web, we need to think how regulations have consequences for that future, and not just how they're meant to be regulating Big Tech" #disinfo2026
Some days ago I learned that booking.com was hacked and had a (full?) data leak in April this year. Turns out that data can be nicely used for phishing, when you already have all the personal information...
I just tried getting an account on VKontakte but found out I need a Russian phone number. The site also blocks a lot of eSIMs. I thought it might be a way to try to find some signals of what is really happening in Buryatia. There's no way I'm plugging in a physical Russian SIM.
California, who I thought was evangelizing digital privacy rights in #USA, just passed a law banning social media for children under the age of 16. The #CCPA is a refreshing piece of legislation that models the pillars of GDPR for Americans. As the birthplace of Silicon Valley, it made sense that Californians understood the criticality of protecting our consumers, and would set a progressive precedent for protecting digital rights. Instead, #California decided to ban young minds from freely expressing themselves or engaging in supportive communities. Now #BigTech has the legal authority to collect even *more* data on them so they can evade infractions. eff.org/press/releases/we-all-…
This headline is extremely misleading. Neither Discord, nor any entity affiliated with or trusted by Discord, was hacked. The hack was against an unofficial 3rd party moderation service that some server operators use. Discord gave them zero sensitive information. It all came from willing users.
I didn't have "replace charging connector on your laptop" on my todo list today, but here we are. It's not even #MaintenanceMonday! Not the prettiest fix, but was using the only socket I had to hand, and it'll do until I can source one the right size. Laptop is back charging nicely.
It's very telling that there's no way for customers to opt out of this profile feature. Whether it's worker surveillance, Ring, or cloud-computing contracts with ICE, Amazon has proven that it doesn't respect people's privacy. www.fastcompany.com/91619118/ama...
The Apollo guidance code that Margaret Hamilton led is available online! It was scanned and shared openly. Her legacy will live on in the fundamentals of software engineering that she created that still form the basis for software design for many space missions. #NASA #software github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-…
My controversial opinion: JavaScript was a mistake It was created to make a button play a noise on your website, not dynamically render a massive single page application A lot of libraries for it exist to try to sweep the technical debt of JavaScript’s slapdash design under the rug
While we are on interesting reads: lwn.net/Articles/1097198/ #rust is really interesting on so many fronts and it is lovely to see the tooling around it to spring up too. With production-ready drivers in eg. #Mesa3d or the #linux kernel already using it, it will certainly be there for the future. Now I only want to see rust-gcc.github.io/ become fully viable. There are also recordings from #RustConf via lwn.net/Articles/1098610/
Been looking into pomodoro timers for awhile now and I think I've settled on Pomotroid. It's free and can be minimized to the Windows system tray with countdown animation. I also like the ticking sound you can add to breaks.
@serrebi I wonder why when I try to bring BlindRSS back to the foreground it does not seem to focus or maximize. I have Ctrl+Alt+B tied to BlindRSS as a desktop shortcut. Ideally I should be able to press that to have the window show and then press Alt+F4 to close it until the next time. Currently, I need to go to the system tray, find the icon, then open that way. If I press Enter on the BlindRSS desktop icon, I get the message it is already running. SO wondering what the best way to fix this is for me.
TCP/IP is impenetrable and yet somehow millions of people get online every single day. It doesn’t matter how impenetrable the protocol is when the products abstract it away, which is the only thing anyone has been saying, lol
Mastodon is a great idea, but it has a fatal flaw: authoritarianism. Mods and admins are free to censor posts and users on a whim, and far too many of them seem eager to do so. I want to see a social media service–it could even be a Mastodon instance–which is run democratically, so that deletions and bans are put up to the vote of all participants. Dictatorships suck, and that includes ONLINE dictatorships! #Mastodon #SocialMedia
It's nice to see that PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects is now targeted for Java 28.
Many years ago I used to work on a Cobol-based application that ran over an 80x25 green screen terminal. People running 30 or 40 users on a 486 PC running SCO Unix hooked up to a multi-port serial card. We'd never have tolerated the amount of waiting between actions or screens that is now considered absolutely normal on web-based cloud-hosted applications. Weird how things change.
SQL Copilot's Read-Only Mode Wasn't Read-Only. I was in Italy for a month. While I was gone, somebody got sysadmin out of SQL Copilot with a variable. The vulnerability is CVE-2026-65669, the SSMS 22 Copilot bug I wrote about early September. www.sqlfingers.com/2026/10/sql-...
More Apple fun. I needed to do some wire transfers. There is the secure-me-2FA-farth-app of the bank that requires a password to confirm the transaction (no banking without smartphone!) As I use complex passwords to secure things, I stored them in Apple's password manager. When the App asks for the password, Apple's password manager now DISPLAYS THE PASSWORD in an overlay notification. And THEN requires the code to apply that password to the field in the banking app.
Question for M365 admins: how do you know your email signatures are actually applying? With most tools, you don't. Sigil measures it, emails you a health digest, and flags mailboxes that never got their signature. Outlook signatures, managed properly. usesigil.app #Microsoft365 #MSP #SysAdmin
I need to give email access to less-than-tech-savvy colleague. She’s a Windows user. Suggestions on a lightweight, bare-bones email client that I can walk her through the install and configure? It’s not her main email client, so I need nothing fancy.
